The Standard visited the Dogpatch gallery on Thursday to speak with the curator and gallerist on her decision to close, the state of San Francisco arts, and what lies next for her.<\/p>\n
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What was San Francisco\u2019s art scene like when you arrived in 2007, and how has that changed?<\/p>\n
In New York, the busier you are, the cooler you are. Here, the busier you are, the more everyone feels sorry for you. You\u2019re like, \u201cI\u2019m so busy,\u201d and they say, \u201cOh, I\u2019m so sorry, I\u2019m going to Bolinas to go surfing.\u201d<\/p>\n
There, all anyone did was talk about money or auction prices. I didn\u2019t feel like people were talking about art or ideas. I remember going to this exclusive party and sitting next to Diane von F\u00fcrstenberg. I thought, \u201cI got invited to this party, I\u2019m sitting next to a celebrity. Is this what people here want?\u201d But I just felt really lonely.<\/p>\n
When I got here, there were interesting artists, good museums, and a lot of really good collectors. And in San Francisco, there were very few galleries, so opening my own just seemed doable.<\/p>\n
\u2018I think the arts here is really, really, really threadbare and in serious trouble.\u2019<\/p>\n
Coming from New York, I had a big ego, so it was easy for me to be like, \u201cI know what\u2019s cool and I\u2019m going to do it.\u201d Of course, it was way harder than I thought, but sometimes you have to have that kind of naivet\u00e9 to jump into something new.<\/p>\n
When I opened in 2009, it was after the huge mortgage crisis, so everyone was struggling. I didn\u2019t expect to make money in my first year anyway. When I opened, everyone was excited because no one was doing anything. I was calling all these artists in New York, and everyone said yes, because it was a quiet moment and I had a lot of opportunity.<\/p>\n
When I opened, Ratio Three (opens in new tab)<\/a> and Jessica Silverman had just opened, but there was still this old guard \u2014 these cool women like Paule Anglim (opens in new tab)<\/a> and Ruth Braunstein (opens in new tab)<\/a>, who had galleries for like 50 years. That doesn\u2019t exist anymore.<\/p>\n After 16 years, what prompted the closure?<\/p>\n I love art, and I love artists. I think artists can teach us to think differently and push us intellectually. That was my guiding light for this project. But in the past couple years, the market has slowed down, not just in San Francisco but internationally.\u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been trying to figure out how to make the gallery sustainable financially. Last year, we opened a pop-up space in Presidio Heights for six months. We tried doing all of these different art fairs. We tried to show new artists. I was working hard to think outside the box and keep things going, and then the summer was very slow sales-wise.\u00a0<\/p>\n I had this existential crisis of \u201cHow do I make this work?\u201d I came up against two things: I have to be a much more aggressive dealer, which is not really my personality, or I have to be much more commercial and make it more like fast fashion. But I don\u2019t want to do either of those things.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bigger galleries can afford to play the long game and wait the market out. In terms of financial issues, it\u2019s not that I\u2019m declaring bankruptcy, but I don\u2019t have a big enough cushion to wait it out.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even up to 2022-23, things were good. This art world contraction has really been in the last two years. For us, the Silicon Valley Bank crash was kind of the beginning of things slowing down a little bit, and they\u2019ve been slowing down more and more since then. The economy of the Bay Area was affected by that, and it has rippled out over time here.\u00a0<\/p>\n I thought, \u201cMaybe I\u2019ve taken this as far as I can take it, and I would rather leave it intact and move on to the next thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Were there specific aspects of the business model that just weren\u2019t working?<\/p>\n It was always important for me to show local artists and give them a platform to be part of the international conversation, because I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a lot of opportunity for that in San Francisco, and one way to do that is to participate in art fairs.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, I think as art fairs became more ingrained in the business model of a gallery, it got harder to compete because they\u2019re really expensive to participate in. The galleries that are successful at that kind of model are multinational corporations with staffs of over 100 people. And so they can afford to have new people going to all of these fairs and they can work that cost into their model. But for a small gallery like mine, it\u2019s just the same three or four people going to every single one over and over again.\u00a0<\/p>\n Also, I think for those bigger galleries, their goal is to sell things that are six or seven figures. Whereas for me, most of the work I have is under $100,000, so we have to do tremendous volume to pay for the fairs. I have five employees, so it\u2019s not only taxing financially, but also physically for us to do that. I think that model is really unsustainable for a small business.<\/p>\n Altman Siegel is now the third San Francisco gallery to announce its closure since July. What do these closures signify for the Bay Area\u2019s art scene?<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1760825168_644_-S3840x2560-FPNG.png\"\/)
Source: Thomas Sawano\/The Standard<\/p>\n
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Altman Siegel will show paintings by Japanese artist Shinpei Kusanagi through Nov. 15 | Source: Thomas Sawano\/The Standard<\/p>\n